Two meter sea level rise unstoppable: climate scientists

By Gerard Wynn OXFORD, England (Reuters) – A rise of at least two meters in the world’s sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday. “The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable,” […]

Water-short Iraq faces new peril: the sea

Baghdad (UPI) Sep 23, 2009 – Iraq’s water crisis is getting worse by the day, adding to the political uncertainty sweeping the country ahead of potentially incendiary parliamentary elections in January. On top of the cutbacks in the water flow of the life-giving Tigris and Euphrates rivers by Turkey, Iraq’s parched south is now threatened […]

Impacts of climate change coming faster and sooner: UNEP

  Washington/Nairobi, 24 September 2009 -The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). An analysis of the very latest, peer-reviewed science indicates that many predictions at the upper end of the IPCC’s forecasts are becoming […]

Ancient glaciers are disappearing faster than ever

  By Michael McCarthy environment editor Melting ice is pouring off Greenland and Antarctica into the sea far faster than was previously realised because of global warming, new scientific research reveals today. The accelerating loss from the world’s two great land-based ice sheets means a rise in sea levels is likely to happen even more […]

Graph of the Day: Louisiana Land Loss, 1932-2050

Coastal Louisiana has lost an average of 34 square miles of land, primarily marsh, per year for the last 50 years. From 1932 to 2000, coastal Louisiana lost 1,900 square miles of land, roughly an area the size of the state of Delaware. If nothing more is done to stop this land loss, Louisiana could […]

Islands warn of extinction at UN climate week

New York (AFP) Sept 21, 2009 – As world leaders gather for key climate talks here, small island nations Monday warned they were running out of time with rising seas threatening to wipe them off the map. Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the planet’s tiniest members grouped together in the Alliance of Small Islands States […]

World's river deltas sinking due to human activity

  ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world’s low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk. While the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel […]

Billion-dollar floodgates might not save Venice

By Sylvia Poggioli The construction of mobile floodgates aims to safeguard the 1,300-year-old island city of Venice. It’s an ambitious engineering project, but some scientists say it may not be sufficient to protect Venice from rising sea levels due to climate change. Venice rose from mudflats in the middle of a lagoon which forms the […]

Chandeleur Islands, 2001-2005

The islands have been generally shrinking and migrating landward since the late 1800s. A survey in the 1980s estimated that they would be in existence for about three more centuries. Before 1996, the seaward front of the islands lost about 20-30 feet of land each year, mostly replaced at the rear. From 1996 to 2004, […]

Bangladesh fears climate change will swallow a third of its land

Millions face loss of homes as sea levels rise By Helene Franchineau, THE WASHINGTON TIMES Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni warned Thursday that rising oceans from climate change could swallow up to a third of her low-lying country and urged other nations to take action at an upcoming environmental summit to mitigate the damage. “We […]

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